Believing (17 page)

“Gammy?” Calla bends over to see her grandmother on all fours. “Are you okay? Did you drop something?”

“She jumped off my lap when the door slammed. See her?”

“Who, Miriam?”

“No!” A laugh spills from under the table. “The kitten. I picked her up from Andy’s house this afternoon.”

“Oh!” Calla peers into the dim space beneath the table. “Where is she?”

“Back there, see? Here, kitty kitty kitty,” Odelia says in a high-pitched voice. “It’s okay, you can come out now. This is Calla. She’s nice.”

Calla finally spots a tiny gray ball of fur and a pair of glittering eyes on the far side of the table, cowering between the table leg and one of the chairs. “Oh! Look at her . . . she’s so sweet!”

“She is, isn’t she?” Odelia grunts, rubbing the small of her back. “I can’t stay down here like this. See if you can get her out, will you?”

As her grandmother backs her hefty form out from under the table and stands with a loud groan, Calla inches forward. “Here, kitty. Come here, little kitty.”

To her surprise, the tiny creature darts toward her. Calla scoops her into her arms, then quickly ducks out and stands. “Gotcha!”

The kitten cuddles in her arms, blinking up at her.

“Wow,” Calla says. “I think I’m in love. Is she the most precious thing ever, or what?”

“She is that. What should we name her?”

“She looks like a Gert to me,” Calla says promptly.

“Gert? As in Gertrude?”

“Don’t you think?”

Odelia smiles. “Gert it is. How’d you come up with that?”

Calla shrugs. “Sometimes things just pop into my head.”

Odelia looks thoughtfully at her. “Speaking of that . . . we should talk about—”

“I have a pile of homework to do,” Calla interrupts, knowing what Odelia is going to say, and not wanting to get into it now. “And I really need to keep my grades up while I’m here, or, you know . . . Dad will make me leave.”

“Okay. No rush. Your schoolwork comes first. I just know that things are happening to you here—things you can’t possibly understand. I remember when I was your age, trying to deal with my gifts and being scared out of my mind.”

Calla’s hand goes still on the kitten’s soft fur as she contemplates that. She never really wondered what it must have been like for Odelia, coming to terms with her visions of dead people. She just figured her grandmother always took it for granted, the way she does now.

She was once in my shoes,
Calla realizes. She gets it.

But what about the whole Kaitlyn Riggs thing? Her grandmother already told her it was wrong for her to get involved in the first place. Remembering Odelia’s reaction to Mrs. Riggs’s visit last week, she knows that her grandmother would freak if she knew about the call from that reporter, much less about Kaitlyn’s visits, and Calla getting caught up in the Erin Shannahan case.

Which she isn’t . . . yet. Not officially, anyway.

What if the killer strikes again . . . and again?

Stop him!

All she has to do is hang on until that class on Saturday, and maybe she can figure out if there’s a way to use her psychic abilities to zero in on the killer.

“Oh!” Odelia slaps her forehead. “I almost forgot to tell you two things. One is, you got some mail today. I put it on the desk in the other room. The other thing is, I have a message for you.”

“From Spirit?” Calla braces herself. Maybe Kaitlyn Riggs has been visiting Odelia, too.

But her grandmother laughs. Hard. Then she says, “No, not from Spirit. From Blue Slayton. And he used the good old-fashioned telephone to get through.”

“Really?” Calla breaks into a grin, wondering if Evangeline was right and he’s going to ask her to homecoming.

“Really,” her grandmother assures her. “He called after school.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Odelia repeats again, with a smile. “Oh, but can you hold off on calling him back until after I order us a pizza for dinner? I was so busy with Gert here that I didn’t have time to cook.”

“Sure. Here, give her to me. I’ll play with her.”

As her grandmother goes to find the takeout menu and the phone, Calla brings the kitten into the living room. So Blue called her. Does he want to ask her to homecoming? Maybe that’s what he was about to do when Ryan hit him in the head with that stupid wad of paper.

On the desk, she finds an envelope addressed to her in Lisa’s loopy handwriting.

“What do you think this is?” she asks the kitten, balancing her with one hand while she opens the envelope with the other.

Inside is an airline voucher. A yellow Post-it note is stuck to it.

Calla, All yours. Let me know when to meet you at the airport! Love, Lisa.

Smiling, she puts the voucher back into the envelope and tucks it into the top drawer. She’ll use it at some point. Just not yet.

The kitten squirms in her arms.

“What? You want to get down? Want to play? Okay.” Calla sets her gently on the floor.

Odelia keeps several skeins of yarn in a basket by her chair, along with several needles, though she doesn’t knit or crochet . . . yet. She says she always wanted to learn and wants to be ready with supplies when she finally gets around to it. Just as she has a guitar she’s never learned to play, and keeps a bin full of scrapbooking supplies for the day she feels like, as she put it, “sorting through and organizing a lifetime’s worth of junk.” Typical Odelia—creative and chaotic, Calla thinks with a smile.

She tosses a ball of yellow yarn across the floor, holding on to one end. Gert trips over her little paws as she scrambles to play with it, and Calla can’t help but giggle.

A few minutes later, Odelia reappears and holds out the cordless phone. “Pizza is on its way,” she says. “Half anchovy and pineapple for me, half mushroom and pepperoni for you.”

“Perfect.” They’ve been getting pizza at least once a week. So far, she’s refused to try Odelia’s unusual combo, unconvinced that it’s as yummy as she claims.

“Calla, can you keep the kitten occupied for a while so that I can get a few things done around here? I’ve been distracted by her all afternoon.”

Calla thinks of all the homework she’s supposed to be doing.

Then she thinks of the call from Blue, and her conversation with Jacy today, and the math test she failed, and the endless rounds of Candyland.

“Sure,” she tells her grandmother, “I’d love to play with her. Just . . . I have to call Blue first.”

“Are you going out with him again?”

“Saturday night.”

“Oh . . . I have a message circle that night down in Sinclairville.”

“It’s okay. I don’t think he was planning on inviting you to come along like Dad did,” Calla says lightly, and grins at her.

Odelia laughs. “Very funny. Do you need his phone number, or do you have it memorized already?”

“I need it.”

“555-4782,” recites Odelia, who was a close friend of Blue’s father, David Slayton—“before he went Hollywood,” as she put it.

She starts to leave the room as Calla dials, though she seems to be taking her sweet old time, stopping to straighten a couple of picture frames and plump sofa pillows along the way.

Ha, that’s what Mom used to do when she wanted to eavesdrop on Calla’s calls to Kevin, back when their relationship was in full swing . . . back when Mom was alive.

Suddenly, Calla finds herself overwhelmed by grief that hits hard, seemingly out of nowhere.

Oh, Mom.
Her eyes are swimming with hot tears, her gut aching so that she’s almost doubled over.

Why does it happen this way? It’s not that she ever really forgets about her loss. There’s a baseline of sadness every day, but then out of the blue, something triggers a fierce tide of sorrow and longing that sweeps her right over the edge.

What she wouldn’t give to be in her own living room back in Tampa right now, talking to Kevin, with Mom annoying her by trying to listen—

“Hello?”

Calla jumps at the unexpected voice in her ear, having forgotten, for a split second, just whom she’d dialed or that she was even on the phone.

“Um . . . Blue?” Her voice comes out sounding a little strangled.

“Yeah. Calla?”

“Yeah. Hi.” She wipes a sleeve across her wet eyes.

“Hang on for a second, will you? I’m on the other line.”

With Willow?
Calla wonders as he clicks off. Or some other girl?

She glumly throws the yarn across the floor again, expecting a long wait, but he’s back on the line before Gert has even skidded to a stop at the fuzzy yellow ball.

“Sorry about that. So, remember how we changed our date to this Saturday night?” he asks, and her heart sinks. He’s not going to ask her to homecoming. He’s going to blow her off entirely.

“My dad gave me these tickets,” he tells her, “to this concert in Buffalo, and I thought we could go. But only if you like jazz.”

She knows nothing about jazz. She’s surprised that he does. And boy, is she relieved that he isn’t canceling on her.

“Sure,” she says. “That sounds great.”

“I’ll pick you up at six. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. See you at lunch tomorrow?”

“Yup.” Calla smiles as she hangs up the phone. “Guess what, Gert? I think he likes me.”

The cat stops pawing at the ball and looks up solemnly.

“Yeah,” Calla tells her, “I do like him, too. But don’t worry. I won’t let myself get hurt. Not this time.”

Again, she thinks of Kevin, and wishes she had never answered his e-mail.

FOURTEEN

Wednesday, September 12
3:40 p.m.

Okay, Calla probably shouldn’t have postponed her homework last night, though romping around on the floor with Gert and a ball of yarn was the best time she’s had in ages.

Unfortunately, she rushed through her homework, and it showed. She wasn’t doing as poorly in her other subjects as she has been in math, but thanks to pure carelessness, she has to rewrite her social studies essay on top of reading both last night and tonight’s
Hamlet
assignments for English. She had to fake her way through the class discussion today.

But that was better than math, where Mr. Bombeck handed back her homework covered in red ink slashes and grimly told her to redo it by tomorrow, in addition to the new assignment. Luckily she’s working with Willow tonight.

Another glitch, though: she’s going to need the Internet in order to research a science project that will be assigned in the next few weeks. That will mean staying after school to use it there, and skipping a couple of days working at Paula’s, or asking to use Ramona’s after she gets home. Knowing Mason and Evangeline hog it nightly as it is, she hates to ask.

Then again, she does have that glimmer of an idea she back-burnered earlier.

One that might give her access to more than just the Internet.

But does she dare pursue it with her father?

Meanwhile, she’ll probably be up until midnight, catching up on everything after she gets back from Willow’s later.
Unless I can get something done here,
she tells herself as she climbs the steps to Paula’s porch after school.

Maybe she can settle the boys in front of a video and—

Nah. That wouldn’t be fair. Paula can do that herself. She’s paying Calla to entertain the boys, and that’s what she needs to do.

“Come on in,” Paula calls in response to her knock.

Calla finds her in the living room, reading a book called
Love You Forever
to the boys, who are curled up on either side of her.

“We’ve been to the library, and we’re reading our way through the stack. I’ll finish this one,” Paula says, looking up from the book. “Have a seat.”

Calla does, and finds herself drawn into the whimsical story, which is about a mother who continues to rock her child to sleep with a lullaby through every stage of his life. Calla is teary eyed when it concludes with the grown son cradling his elderly mother in his arms, rocking her to sleep with the same lullaby.

As she sneaks a hand up to wipe her moist cheeks, she catches Paula doing the same thing. Maybe she, too, lost her mom. Or maybe it’s just because she is a mom. Whatever . . . when she looks up, her eyes are shiny, and she smiles at Calla.

“That one gets me every time,” she tells her.

“Can you read it to us, Calla?” Dylan asks. “I want to hear it again.”

“Oh, let Calla read a different one. How about a silly one?” Paula speaks up quickly, as if she knows that anything that tugs on the heartstrings—especially anything involving a mother and child—is especially emotional for her right now.

“You can read
Walter the Farting Dog,
then,” Dylan decides.

“Fart!” Ethan echoes.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. They’re all yours, Calla.” With a laugh, Paula pulls herself to standing and hobbles toward the kitchen. In the doorway, she turns back. “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you . . . someone was asking about you down at the café this morning.”

“What do you mean?”

“My husband was on his way out, and he overheard a man who wanted to know if there was a new girl in town, about seventeen, a medium who was living with her grandmother. You’re the only one around here who fits the bill.”

“Who was the man?” Calla asks, remembering the AP reporter who called. And Kaitlyn’s killer.

Please let it have been the reporter. Please.

“Marty had never seen him before. And he said he had sunglasses on, so he couldn’t really see his face.”

“Did the guy get my name?”

“I don’t know. Unlike me, my husband is the type of person who doesn’t like to get involved, so he left.” She rolls her eyes. “You know, if I were there, I would have gone over and asked who he was and why he was asking about you. When Marty told me . . . I don’t know. It made me nervous and—” Paula glances at Dylan and breaks off abruptly.

Calla looks over to see that the little boy’s eyes are round.

“That was the bad man,” he says suddenly. “Right?”

“What are you talking about, honey?” Paula asks.

“The man. The one with the raccoon eye. Kelly told me he’s looking for Calla.”

“Dylan was with your husband when he was in the café?” Calla asks Paula, shaken.